The past week I was tardy because it was Fashion Week, the week before it was Rock Week, the one before I got a girlfriend, and the one prior I joined Tau Zeta Kappa. The models outside of the shows have all been posing, for me I thought, until I realized that they in fact were not and instead were flashing their tights for middle-aged photographers, though not from the middle ages, and these girls/photogs. were too professional to be of an age.

Today, inside the tent after the Hervé Léger show, I forgot to lie and say that I was a turtleneck designer, but my girlfriend lied instead to a video camera-wielding bat boy and he answered with, “Oh, Congratulations.” This I loved; there is nary a better rebuke than a “Congrats, best of luck.”

Tasting That Sweet Mercedes-Benz

I posed stupidly and wondered why all of the things that I read cover the drunken, the rock and the wasted, bawdy and negligent aspects of this week but hardly about the hem of a skirt. Do hems still have skirts? Can I date someone who doesn’t wear tights? Did we get out of that Russian Romanoff stage that we’ve been doing? I love more of that as a descendant and as someone who enjoys wearing embroidered dresses with meaningful details. Jewelry, still none?

Everyone wore nice cardigans? Linen shirts? Badgley Mischka failed again to have a bear in their show, I’ve been waiting for that one since I was 1613 but still nothing, and they are eons better designers than Marc Jacobs Jacobson, but he’s the one with the stupid stunts and the cheap clothing that yells. I want, or better yet, I dream of more of the understated and innovative designers, but I guess that they don’t have those intimate dinner parties for 3000 where you go fuck yourself at the door. Anyway, Alexander McQueen failed miserably at his last year. And today, Uzhasniy Rebenok failed to show up, I surmise because of how terrible (s)he is.

The most comical scene of the day was the man who responded with “I don’t drink” when approached by an attractive woman breasting a bucket of Peroni through the cacophony of those in mode and waiting patiently for the next show. Look, it’s enough to say “no,” or “no, thank you,” but to flaunt this choice as superior works for me as much as coming up to the bar and yelling, “I’m fucking drunk, but not enough!”

A Détacher Does Avant-Crochet, Spring 2010 Show at the Altman Building

Another overheard bit please. “I told my two-year old daughter that her mother is a negligent clothes (muffled).” This person to anyone else would seem as one who asks you if you’d like another toast au caviar en blanc to the guy who laughingly belts out, “I’m g’na smash this boutle ova er ‘ead.” “I’ll speak to you in third person on a first date,” is all that says.

I hate bead-strewn fashion and baubly trinket shows as much as I dislike AA, in either case I sit in a metal chair surrounded by people who are trading tips on how to get from this row to the front one, and then listen to them grow furiously righteous as they make it into the best seat only to share their weaknesses.

Do you notice that almost everyone who is fashionable is quiet? It’s a medium of expression with its own über-ädchenrock because only a few who participate in it are capable of producing a line worth reprinting. They are not writers and we are all wearers, so let’s forget Huysmans or that joke about reading all of Proust. This seems to be the point that “mainstream” media agrees on: fashion people are impossible to interview but delectable to feature. Frankly, I haven’t heard anyone in a while ask the right questions. It all comes off like asking Rocco Siffredi if he is getting laid yet or questioning Elizabeth Feodorovna how much faster Pentium III is going to be, as compared to Pentium II.

To be a fashionista, you have to be able to answer questions about shoes or whether an oversize shirt under a vintage leather jacket will “fly” for yet again another season. To be in fashion one has to ask questions that will provoke your peers. The entire quest is not for answers but for questions.

How will you look different tomorrow? –Tim Nestor/photos by MVW

Post a Response

This is a gravatar-friendly blog, enter your e-mail address to use your gravatar.